


you know you've only got one

by skitzofreak



Series: spy games [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, M/M, Other, Sequel, Siblings, and then getting some unexpected perspective, background rebels, positivity, worrying about the worst that can happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 20:02:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15758700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: Some spy recruits discuss their classmates, their prospects for the future, and their hard-ass instructors.





	you know you've only got one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brynnmclean (ilfirin_estel)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilfirin_estel/gifts).



> Some thoughts on positivity.
> 
> Really won't make as much sense unless you've read "smile like you mean it," the first story in this series.

Nicolás was favoring his right arm, although it was pretty obvious he didn’t want Matías to notice. He walked on Matías’ right side, keeping his injured arm as out of sight from his younger brother as possible as they walked into the busy aft galley of Home One. Matías liked the aft galley – it was less crowded than the forward galley, but not as narrow as the foc’scle galley. It usually had just enough space for him and his brothers to find seating together without constantly bumping elbows with the other rebels in the mess. Judging by the ginger way that Nico was moving his right arm, bumping elbows would be a particular pain he’d want to avoid today.

He caught Matías’ glare as they pushed their way into the queue for food, and raised his eyebrow. The small scar that ran above his right eye stretched out with the motion, whitening against his golden-brown skin. Other people had difficulty telling the Prieto triplets apart, but Matías found that idiotic. Nico was a little taller, a little broader, a little more golden, a lot more muscled under his uniform – he was just the better-made brother of the lot. He was also the most stubborn.

“You iced that today?” Matías demanded, nodding towards Nico’s right shoulder.

His brother had the grace to look at least a little sheepish. “It’s fine. I’ll grab a cold pack later, after I finish my shift.”

“We just ran ten klicks through an obstacle course in the most humid of the hells,” Matías shot back, picking up three trays and shoving one at Nico, the other behind him to Lautaro. His younger brother didn’t take it until Matías shoved it into his ribs, his attention caught on something across the room. Matías didn’t bother to check; he had other priorities. “What if the joint swells up and you need surgery again?”

Nico’s expression stayed singularly unimpressed. “And what if the arm gets gangrenous and falls off?”

“I’m not a worry-rat,” Matías scowled, shuffling forward with the queue. Lautaro bumped into his back gently, attention still focused outward. Matías threw a glance over his shoulder, but Taro was too busy waving and gesturing to some other droid tech from his assigned bay, miming some complicated message to the laughing Twi’lek. “I’m just pointing out the possibilities,” Matías continued, turning back to Nico. “I’m being _realistic.”_

Nico sighed, nodded his thanks as he accepted the tray, and shrugged his left shoulder. “Yes, I’ll ice the shoulder. It’s fine now. Leave it,” he added when Matías opened his mouth to argue more, his voice dropping directly to the Older Brother tone that he used when he had made up his mind about something. _Listen to your brother_ , that tone said, _he is the eldest and therefore responsible._ Sometimes he heard it in Nicolás’ voice, and sometimes in Aunt Zophie’s much more shrill tone. Matías hated it either way, hated how even after all these years of being an adult, he still snapped his mouth shut when he heard it. _Older by all of ten minutes_ , he thought a touch sulkily, but knew better than to say. That was an old fight he didn’t need to bring up, not in public, maybe not ever. Aunt Zophie was far away, and Matías had no desire to bring her closer, even in spirit.

Nico gave him a steady look for a second longer, calm, unhurried, and then turned around and held out his tray with his left hand to the droid scooping green mush onto it. Protein mush, probably, and the orange stuff was carbohydrate mush, and the blueish stuff was probably vitamin mush.

“Ooh, look, there are cubes in the orange goo today,” Lautaro piped up from behind him, apparently done staring at whatever had drawn his flighty attention earlier. “Mm, mm, I do love _cubes.”_

“Just like Aunt Zophie used to make,” Nico replied with a dry smile over his shoulder, accepting his orange mush with a polite smile to the droid serving it. Matías mimicked the generic smile too as the stuff spattered on his own tray – he figured the droids didn’t care one way or another, but Lautaro could get really weird about that sort of thing. The little pile of orange mush flopped over on it’s side on Matías’ tray, sad and runny and full of gelatin cubes of some kind. Aunt Zophie would have a _fit_ if she heard Nico compare this stuff to her own cooking. An unjustified fit, maybe, but probably a pretty spectacular one.

“Hey, Three-Gee,” Taro grinned at the green-mush-distributing droid. “What we got today, grilled Naboo cucumber and hoolan salad?” The droid paused and raised it’s blinking optic to Taro’s face. “You really know how to spoil a guy!” Taro winked and let his smile widen, showing off the chipped front tooth that he seemed to think made him look irresistible. The droid made a series of clicks, a pared-down form of Binary that essentially translated to _{nutrition = efficient sustainment (subset Human); Prieto/Lautaro/Lieutenant = continuous humorous misunderstanding}._

“Aw, you love my jokes, Three-Gee, don’t play around,” Taro laughed, and moved on down the line. “You’d miss me if I stopped. Hey, Four-Jay, gimme some of that orange cubey goodness. Slip a little extra on that tray, hey, buddy? I’m a growing boy, got to keep my strength up.”

Matías shook his head and left his younger brother to chatter at the droids. Nico had already found them a seat, and to Matías’ combined amusement and exasperation, had made sure to sit with an empty seat on his right side. A private moved to sit in the chair, but Nico thumped his tray down hard and shook his head, looking the boy right in the eye. The private frowned but turned and moved on. Hah. Definitely not interested in anyone bumping that right arm, hey, Nico? But no, Matías, stop _worrying_ , it’s _fine_ , not a problem _at all._ Matías settled on Nico’s left, and pulled the chair on his left out for Taro, who sauntered over a minute later, flopped down with his (slightly more loaded) tray, and grinned at them both.

“ _So guess what I found_ ,” he said in Vuchellian.

Nico and Matías shared a glance. _Uh oh_.

“ _If it’s classified,”_ Nico warned him, digging into his multicolored mush with the methodical precision that he dealt with everything, “ _This is not the correct place to discuss it_.”

Taro pouted, “ _What makes you think it’s classified? I don’t break security protocols.”_

Matías eyed him as he picked at his own green mush. The orange stuff just looked too…weird for him, but the green wasn’t too bad. For protein mush. _“You only switch to Vuchellian,”_ he said pointedly, _“when you want to talk about something you shouldn’t. You think no one else here speaks it?”_

“ _No one else from Vuchelle around here_ ,” Taro shrugged and shoveled a heaping spoonful of blue and orange mush into his mouth. Matías looked back at his own tray and tried not to gag. Next to him, Nico was already done with the green mush and was working on the orange. _“And no one speaks any Alderaanian unless it’s some weird dialect from some backwater place no one’s ever heard of.”_

“Then it’s just rude of you to cut people out like that,” Nico snapped in Basic, his eyes scanning the crowd of the galley. Taro blinked at him with his cheek bulging, and Matías glanced at Nico from the corner of his eye. That was a bit harsh even for his blunt brother.

“Okay,” Taro said after a beat, and shoveled another mouthful into his face. “So anyway,” he said in muffled Basic, grinning around his bulging cheek again (that was the thing with Lautaro, he got over things quick, fell down and bounced back up and laughed as he moved on), “guess what I found out?”

Nico didn’t answer, his blue eyes fixed on the galley crowd – no, on something specific in the galley crowd. Matías leaned a little to the right as discreetly as he could and tried to follow his brother’s eyeline. Nothing that he could pick out. What was Nico looking at like that? Was something wrong? Did he see someone that he didn’t like, that had a problem with him? If someone was picking a fight with Nico, they were picking a fight with all the Prieto brothers.

He hoped Nico hadn’t picked a fight with anyone. Seemed unlikely, but still.

“Well?” Taro’s leg bounced a little under the table, and in Matías’ head, Aunt Zophie clucked her tongue and whacked her fan against the countertops. _Always so full of energy, that one, a live wire_ _who will shock you if not handled with care_. If Matías didn’t answer him, he’d probably wait until he couldn’t hold it in anymore, and then shout it to the galley. Distractedly, Matías took another bite. “Is it that we have to run the obstacle course again tomorrow? I heard that from Captain Derlin.”

“No,” Taro paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth, green and orange dripping from it. The colors on his tray were starting to run together in an unappetizing brown, but Taro never seemed to mind. _The fool boy would eat a Rodian slug if we put it on his plate,_ Aunt Zophie sniffed, her fan snapping open in disapproval. _I won’t waste good cooking on that unrefined palate, lads._ “Well, okay, _yes,_ we _will_ , but that’s not what I was going to tell you.”

“If I had known this spy training would involve so much running,” Matías groaned, picking the orange cubes out and scooping up some of the mush. “I would have stayed in the maintenance hangar.”

“You _are_ still in the maintenance hangar,” Taro countered, a dribble of blue mush running down his chin. He swiped at it with the back of his hand. “You’re headed there for the shift after meal, aren’t you?”

Matías waved a dismissive hand. “Not what I meant.”

“If you don’t want this, Matías,” Nico said suddenly, dragging his attention back to the conversation and away from whatever he found so fascinating across the galley, “If you don’t want to be an Intelligence operative, you don’t have to stay in the class.”

Matías scraped his spoon against the bottom of the tray and didn’t look up. He didn’t need to see his brother looking at him with that intense, serious frown that Nico always had when he was saying something he considered his responsibility to say. Absurdly, Matías had the urge to growl something inane, like _you are not our parent, you’re not responsible for us, no matter what Aunt Zophie said._ He swallowed it back, though. He’d said those words more than once before, and it had changed nothing. Nicolás Prieto was a stubborn ass, and once he got an idea in his head, it stayed there. This particular idea had been jammed into his brain since they were twelve years old and gone to live with their last living relative for the first time. It had _years_ to settle into Nico’s bones, into the way he carried himself, the way he thought. The choices he made.

The rebellions he joined, Matías thought a touch sourly.

“I helped with the astromechs too,” he said at last, hating how defensive he sounded. He almost added _so this is all my fault anyway_ , but that would go down like a lead balloon in a parade, and would definitely make Nico’s frown worse. “If I hadn’t found that data, you wouldn’t have anything to analyze, and Command wouldn’t have tapped you to move from Analysis to Field Ops.”

“If I hadn’t told them you and Taro helped me,” Nico replied, setting his own spoon down next to the remains of his meal and folding his hands on the table top, “they would have left you both in your maintenance jobs.”

“Hebsley!” Taro called across the galley, and waved enthusiastically as the green-and-orange-haired private a few rows over caught sight of him and grinned. “Hey, over here!”

Private Hebsley, another member of their spy-class (Potential Operative Evaluation and Training course, but Matías refused to call himself a P.O.E.T. candidate, no matter how hard Taro laughed when the subject came up), hopped lightly across the empty tables and thunked her tray down across from Taro. “Hey, Lieutenant,” she grinned, then turned and made a small show of noticing the other two. “Lieutenant,” she giggled, looking at Matías, then Nico. “Lieutenant.”

“Call me Taro,” his younger brother stuck his hand across to shake hers. “The grumpy one is Matías, the stuck up one is Nico.”

“Hi!” She waved at them cheerfully. “Tripp Hebsley.”

Matías nodded to her, and Nico gave her a vague smile and then turned his attention back to the galley. His eyes seemed to lock on something again, and Matías squinted out into the crowd, trying to see what it was. People. Just people, all milling around, chatting in their own little circles. No one seemed to be staring back at Nico – no, wait, just there, across the room. Wasn’t that…oh, what was their name? They were in the spy training too, a tech sergeant with an Outer Rim hairstyle and two-toned eyes. Rule. Rune. Rue. That was it. Tech Sergeant Rue sat sideways to the Prieto brothers, their head bent and their black braids swinging down to cover their face. Every now and again, they tossed the braids back and glanced over, and unless Matías was very mistaken, that last glance had landed squarely on Nico. Or…maybe not. Hard to tell, from this angle and distance. He probably had it all wrong anyway, and neither Rue nor Nico were looking at one another.

On the other hand, that was just the kind of unfortunate complication that would happen to Matías Prieto’s life.

“So you heard, right?” Hebsley leaned across her tray and smiled at Taro, drawing Matías’ attention away from the mystery of Nico’s strange distraction. “About Erso?”

“I did!” Taro propped his elbows on the table and leaned right back, his voice turning excited. Matías hoped that was…alright. After all, Taro was a lieutenant, and Hebsley a private. Fraternization wasn’t a big deal in the Alliance so far as Matías had seen yet, but still, someone might take it the wrong way. Taro wasn’t really a creep or anything, he flirted with everyone – he flirted with _galley_ _droids_ , for hells sake – but someone might get the wrong idea. And then Taro would be in trouble, and Nico would take it upon himself to sort it out because he was the _responsible_ one, and honestly the whole thing would just be…ugh. Just his luck.

“She’s going to be running us through the course tomorrow!” Hebsley sat back and waved her spoon around, getting a few flecks of blue mush on her hand. Aunt Zophie would have been horrified at such behavior, and probably would have chased the girl from her table. Matías shook his head to banish the deep frown he could see in his mind’s eye, carving lines through his aunt’s pinched cheeks. Aunt Zophie looked nothing like Mamá when she frowned, but it still wasn’t Matías’ favorite expression on her face.

“That’s going to be amazing,” Taro gushed. “I’ve heard she’s one of the best trainers around here. You think she’ll talk about,” he raised an eyebrow and gave Hebsley a conspiratorial grin, “you know, Scarif? The Death Star plans? How she was one of the only ones to get away?”

Hebsley bit her lip. “I dunno. It would be cool, but I don’t think I’ll have the guts to ask her. But oh, oh, did you know,” her voice dropped to an awed whisper, “we’ve actually already met her?”

Taro’s mouth dropped open. “ _What?”_

Heblsey nodded and clapped her hands.

“Well?” Taro demanded, waving a hand impatiently at her. “Come on, don’t leave me hanging here. What do you mean, we’ve met her?”

“You mean you don’t know?” She seemed to remember her food and took a big bite. “I mean, I definitely remember her.”

Taro flicked some blue mush at her, and she squealed.

Well, they weren’t in the same division, Matías told himself. It was probably fine if people thought they were flirting. He wasn’t going to worry about it. He had enough things on his mind.

Of course, if they both made it through the spy training, then they _would_ be in the same division… but then, maybe spooks did it differently? He’d heard some rumors, although Captain Derlin hadn’t confirmed it yet in their training, that spies had their own strange way of dealing with rank within the Alliance. So Taro could probably get away with flirting with everything, and Hebsley wouldn’t be a private anymore because who ever heard of a private as a field operative? And no one would make a big deal out of Taro being a bit of a dummy around a pretty girl, and Nico wouldn’t have to get involved.

Matías leaned a little closer to Nico and dropped his voice, striving for a casual tone under the excited babble of Taro and Hebsley. He switched to Vuchellian, too, because rude or not, he didn’t need some stranger like Hebsley listening in as he prodded his brother. “ _We know that sergeant, right?”_

“Erso?” Nico asked in a slightly detached voice, his fingers tight on his spoon. “ _Yeah_ ,” he answered in Vuchellian, responding thoughtlessly to Matías’ use of their native tongue. _“Big hero from the Battle of Scarif.”_

 _“No,”_ Matías shook his head. _“I meant that one, right there. Tech Sergeant Rue, right?”_

Nico blinked, and snapped his head to look at Matías. “It’s rude to speak Vuchellian in public,” he said sharply, the same tone he’d used earlier on Taro.

Matías glared at him. “It’s rude to stare,” he shot back.

“I am not - ” Nico stopped, cleared his throat. “Hm,” he grunted, and turned his expression back to his tray.

“Oh, look, there she is!” Hebsley’s voice cut through Matías’ response, and he turned to follow her spoon, which pointed across the galley in a different direction from Tech Sergeant Rue. A Human fem with dark hair and a sergeant’s badge pinned to her belt strode into the space, and it only took Matías a moment to place her – the sergeant who had helped train his spy class a few days back. She had walked with an enormous Imperial KX droid at her heels (a droid that Taro hadn’t shut up about for hours afterwards), and while she hadn’t spoken much, she’d been the only one who came close to breaking the bearing of the hard-ass who had been their primary instructor that day.

Speaking of hard-asses…

“ _Mierdai kor_ ,” Taro swore in Vuchellian. “It’s that guy!”

Instead of the towering KX droid, the sergeant walked just in front of a tall, lean Human male with a short dark beard and a surprisingly civilian haircut, despite the officer rank badge on his jacket. They were far across the galley and partially obscured by the crowd, but there was no doubt about it; that was definitely the hard-ass and his assistant from that spy lesson about maintaining bearing. An interesting lesson, sure, but Matías really hadn’t enjoyed letting so many people get in his face and try to make him flinch, or laugh. Taro had loved it, Nico had been aggravatingly good at it (with one painfully obvious exception, now that Matías thought about it), but Matías had just…not been into it. And frankly, that officer had freaked him out a little. The officer had ordered each potential spy to try and get in his own face and break his bearing, and Matías had only given a cursory try before backing off. Something about that instructor’s face had just not settled well with Matías. Later, he decided that it was just that no one had ever looked at him with eyes that…empty. It had given him nightmares that sleep cycle; he’d dreamed of walking up to Nico and Taro and seeing that same dark _nothing_ in their normally bright blue eyes, and the next morning he had almost quit the spy class on the spot.

But Taro and Nico seemed determined to see it through, and there was no way in any hell Matías wasn’t going to be there with them if that was where they were going. So here he was, almost a week later, watching the empty-eyed hard-ass sit down a few meters away with the sergeant that both Taro and Hebsley seemed very keen to watch.

“I thought she’d be taller,” Nico muttered at his side, though the dry humor in his voice meant he was more poking at Matías than at the sergeant herself. Matías blinked at him, then belatedly his brain made the connection. Oh. So that was the famous Sergeant Jyn Erso. In retrospect, he guessed he understood why people got so excited about her. Sure there was all that stuff about Scarif and the Death Star and the war. But far more impressive, from where Matías was standing anyway, was the fact that she had been the only one who didn’t crumble in front of the hard-ass instructor. She’s looked flat out relaxed, actually, although any person who could walk with a killer KX droid on her heels like it was some kind of ambulatory purse probably didn’t stress too much about empty-eyed officers. Probably an officer. Matías couldn’t exactly see the rank badge from here, and he wasn’t about to go over there and check.

“He’s a captain,” Taro said triumphantly to the left, as if he’d read Matías’ thoughts. “I can see his rank badge. I knew it! I knew he was an officer. Sergeants are mean, too, but that guy was cold as winter’s arsehole.”

“I thought he was nice,” Hebsley defended the instructor. “Uh, you know, in a way,” she stammered when all three brothers turned to stare at her. “He didn’t yell at us or call us names or anything. Not like a drill instructor at all.”

“You and I had very different drill instructors,” Taro told her, though he smiled when he spoke. “Oh, hey, you think we can figure out his name by looking up the Scarif file on the server?”

Hebsley wrinkled her nose and tugged absently on a lock of bright green hair. “Nah, I think they scrubbed most names except Erso and Rook and a couple others. Anyway, how do you know he was on Scarif?”

“I don’t,” Taro tapped the table excitedly, his leg bouncing under the table again. “But I got a theory, hear me out…”

Across the galley, Erso said something to Captain Hard-ass, who nodded, face expressionless as he chewed his mush. Even here, in the most relaxed place on Home One, the guy looked as stiff as Erso’s KX droid. Maybe he never turned it off, Matías thought; some of the older veterans were like that, always ready for the general quarters alarms to sound, always ready for the Empire to pop out of nowhere and blow them all away. Maybe it was just the emptiness in his eyes had already devoured the captain’s soul.

Maybe that was what happened when someone was a spy long enough.

Matías turned slightly in his chair, towards Nico. He opened his mouth to ask about their assignment for tomorrow, if Nico maybe knew where the spy class was supposed to meet, but a shadow fell over the table and he snapped his mouth shut.

“Hello,” Tech Sergeant Rue said, and tilted their head, making their black braids swing. “Lieutenant Prieto. Did I say that right?”

Nico opened his mouth, shut it again. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Yes. Hello, Tech Sergeant Silas Rue.”

“You remember me.” They smiled , slipped their right hand into their pocket casually.

“Of course,” Nico smiled in that particular way he had, the partial grin that Matías could never quite copy and Taro never bothered to try.

A small silence stretched out, punctuated by Taro and Heblsey still rapid-fire gossiping about Erso and her blank-faced companion. Matías didn’t particularly see the appeal – the captain had been scary, but Erso’s face wasn’t much friendlier from here, and he didn’t think a person known for being hard to kill necessarily meant they were fun to hang around. _Give a rancor a wide berth_ , Aunt Zophie liked to say, _and hope it won’t crunch your bones_. He was perfectly happy staying over here, on his side of the war.

Even if “here” was getting a little awkward, at the moment. “Technically,” he said into the silence between his older brother and the tech sergeant, “we’re all ‘Lieutenant Prieto.’” He gestured toward himself and the oblivious Taro. “ _He’s_ Nicolás,” he jabbed a thumb at his silent brother. “I’m Matías. That’s,” he glanced at Taro, who was apparently competing with Hebsley to see who could “act natural” the best as they stared at the instructors across the galley. The effect was somewhat spoiled by Hebsley’s wide eyes and the fact that Taro’s elbow was squarely in his orange mush. “ _That’s_ an idiot,” Matías grunted, and turned his back.

Rue smiled. “Nicolás,” they said slowly, as if testing the word. Their multicolored eyes searched his face intently, lingering on the small scar over Nico’s right eye. “We’ve met, but I never got your name. Your, ah, full name.”

“Right,” Nico suddenly came back to life, leaning back in his chair and resting his wrists on the edge of the table in a pose that communicated he was completely and totally relaxed. Matías rolled his eyes. “We worked on the kyber case, awhile back. Tech Sergeant Rue had valuable information on the Mygeeto crystal trade,” Nico turned to Matías and said in a serious tone, as if he were explaining something of extreme importance to his brother. Matías worked to keep his face as straight as possible and nodded back. “Analysis would never have contributed as much to Operation Fracture as we did without their help.”

“Silas,” Rue said quietly. “You can call me Silas, Lieut- Nicolás.”

“Silas,” Nico repeated, his voice going oddly rough on the word.

 _Oh_ , thought Matías. _Mierdai kor_. This was…this was going to be a problem. Taro’s crushes were easy, he fell in and out of adoration at the drop of a feather. Nico never had crushes. For the longest time, they’d all thought that he just didn’t care about things like love or sex at all ( _nevermind_ , Aunt Zophie had said, _you have enough to get on with keeping those brothers of yours out of trouble_ ). But Nico wasn’t totally disinterested, it just turned out that his interest had a list of requirements twenty parsecs long, which so far in their lives only one person had ever checked. Nico had proved at the age of twenty that he didn’t get crushes, he just went straight into total devotion, followed eventually with devastating heartbreak.

If he was going down that road again, Matías was going to need to read up on his therapy books. Maybe even write to Aunt Zophie. She might be a horrible old bat who put way too much pressure on Nico…but she had snapped Nico out of depression once. If it came to that desperate pass, he would ask her to do it again.

“I didn’t think we’d meet again after that operation,” Rue was saying, and sure, Matías could see the attraction. Rue had a pleasant alto voice, the contrast of their one blue and one brown eye was compelling, and there was a studied grace in the way they moved. Nico always did enjoy watching the dancers on Vuchelle. The smooth way that Rue moved across the galley, the way they curled their hand through the air in a gentle gesture of greeting…yes, Matías could see why Nico was staring. Rue tilted their head again, and Nico’s eyes flicked to the swaying black braids, his fingers curling slightly against the fake wood grain of the galley table.

This was horrible.

“Hey,” Taro said suddenly. “Rue, right? Aren’t you Rue? From class?”

“Hello,” Rue turned and smiled at both Taro and Hebsley. “Yes, I’m Rue. I’m glad to see you’ve all still made it through the training.”

Hebsley grinned and waved, but to Matías’ horror, Taro’s smile turned calculating.  “Oh, yeah, we’re doing great,” he said in far, far too casual a tone. “Glad you’re still there, too. Aren’t we glad, Matías? Nico?” He propped his elbow on the table top (still oblivious to the orange gunk now slowly drying on the cloth, the fool), and gave his brothers his best Innocent As The Day Is New face.

Matías opened his mouth to tell his idiot brother to behave.

“Yes,” Nico said quietly. “We are.”

Mentally, Matías entertained a series of curse words that would have turned Aunt Zophie’s face purple if she heard them. Oh yes. Nico was definitely walking face-first into that particular brand of utter devotion. This could only end in pain.

“I should go,” Rue said, their ears faintly red around the edges. “I’m on shift in a few minutes. But I’ll see you all tomorrow at class, right?” They met Nico’s eyes, and Matías watched his brother nod solemnly, despairing.

“I’ll see you there, Silas,” Nico’s voice rolled over the tech sergeant’s name, and they left. Nico watched them go.

Yes, yes, Matías thought with resignation. Very graceful. Beautiful eyes. Nice ass, too. Probably pretty smart too, or funny, or whatever it was that had caught Nico’s attention when they worked together on the, what was it? Kyber thing. Come to think of it, Nico had been really quiet a few months back, but then, everyone had been in a pretty dark place right before Scarif, supplies low, victories lower. Matías had assumed Nico was just depressed about their terrible survival odds, like a normal person, not…not _pining_.

“So they seem,” Taro said a touch too loudly. “Nice.”

 _Mierdia. Here we go_.

“They are,” Heblsey said innocently. “Really smart, too. They were a slave on Mygeeto, but they figured out how to get free without any rescue and got away, and joined the rebellion even though they didn’t know where to even start looking. I don’t know all the details, um,” she frowned, shrugged. “Seemed kind of rude to ask, but it’s totally amazing, anyway.”

“Amazing,” Nico murmured, still looking off into the crowd.

Matías resisted the urge to put his head on his arms. Looking at that strange distance in Nico’s eyes was too stressful, and Taro’s speculative grin made all the hair on Matías’ arms stand on end, so he turned back to the galley.

Sergeant Erso was talking again, gesturing with her fork. Captain Hard-ass was watching her, blank as always. Idly, Matías wondered if the captain was even listening, or if he had just…gone away inside his head, the way he had during their training session. Well, Matías sure wasn’t about to get involved enough to find out. _Better to stay clear of the rancor_ , Aunt Zophie clucked in his head.

“So,” Taro leaned around Matías and smiled at Nico, who flicked him a sideways look and picked up his spoon again, determinedly scraping at the last of his mush. “Tech Sergeant Silas Rue, huh?”

Sergeant Erso made a stabbing gesture with her fork, and her face split into a sharp-edged grin. Must be a good story.

“Yes,” Nico said shortly. “That is their name and rank.”

Erso shrugged one shoulder, set her fork on her tray, and laid her hand flat on the table between herself and Captain Hard-ass. Matías kept his eyes on her gloved hand, because it was safer than looking at Nico’s expression. Love had never been anything but a pain in the ass, as far as Matías was concerned, and it would only end badly. Nico was being stupid. Not his fault, maybe, but still. At least the hero sergeant and the empty-eyed hard-ass weren’t staring longingly at their next big heartbreak.

“Well,” Taro chuckled. “Isn’t that _delightful?_ ”

Captain Hard-ass reached across the table and curled his fingers around Erso’s hand.

Wait, what?

“Leave it,” Nico said in his Older Brother voice, and then set his spoon down on the empty tray.

“Oh come on,” Taro whined. “You go moon-eyed at some sergeant and I’m not allowed to comment on how weird that is?”

Erso flipped her hand under the captain’s, weaving her fingers through his, and the man smiled. Not just any faint, polite smile, either, but a real grin that transformed his face, warming his eyes, highlighting a dimple in his cheek. Matías blinked, because the frightening spy instructor from a few days ago was gone, and in his place was an unfairly attractive man who looked like someone Matías would maybe like to know. He also looked wholly absorbed in Erso – even after the smile faded on his face and they pulled their hands apart, the warmth lingered in his eyes.

“Dangerous,” Matías muttered, although he wasn’t entirely sure who he was talking to. Or who he was talking about.

“I’m allowed to like someone,” Nico said flatly.

 “Sure, sure,” Taro waved a hand, as Hebsley stuffed a spoonful of mush in her mouth and tried to look like she wasn’t staring at them all. “But don’t get too, you know, _intense_ about it. I can already see Matías getting all worked up in his grumpy head.” He elbowed Matías in the arm, hard. “The worry wheels are already chugging.” He pitched his voice up, mock-trembling as he wrung his hands together. “ _What if you get your heart broken again? What if they don’t like you after all? What if the sky falls and the Empire kills us all?”_

“Leave him alone,” Nico said sternly.

“Hey,” Taro jabbed at Matías’ arm again with his orange-encrusted elbow. “You in there? Come on, snap out of it and tell Nico how dating Rue would just be the worst thing ever to happen in the history of ever. Like you do.”

Erso and Captain Hard-ass walked out of the galley, and Matías watched as the officer moved to allow the sergeant to walk in front of him, his hand brushing her hip as she passed him before dropping immediately.

His eyes had been so empty during that training session, empty enough to give Matías nightmares. Matías had a suspicion that the longer he stayed in Intel, though, the more of that emptiness he would see, peering out at him the faces of the other operatives. Maybe even one day he would turn around and there would be Nico or Taro or his own reflection, dark and blank and gone away somewhere inside their own heads.

And then the officer had put his hand over Erso’s, and smiled, and for a minute, he had looked like a person again.

Matías cleared his throat, and turned to face Nico. “You should ask Rue over for game night tomorrow,” he said. “Get to know them a bit better.”

Nico’s scar stretched again as he raised his eyebrow.

“Uh,” Taro coughed. “What?”

“They like card games,” Hebsley piped up helpfully, glancing between the brothers. “We played a couple a few days ago. Maybe you could play sabaac?”

Matías met Nico’s stare and shrugged. “Yeah, why not?”

“Why not?” Taro repeated incredulously. “Why _not?_ ”

“Yeah,” Matías rounded on him, glaring. “Why not? Rue seems like a good person. We could be pretty good friends.” He looked back at Nico, not quite ready to meet his eye. “Could be good,” he repeated softly.

“When did you get so…positive?” Taro frowned.

“We should,” Nico interrupted before Matías could turn and snap at him again. “I should,” he corrected. “Invite Rue over, I mean.”

“Good,” Matías said shortly, and pushed himself to his feet, scooping up his tray. “Let’s do that. You too, Hebsley,” he added, because why not? Taro needed friends too, and he seemed to like Hebsley well enough. “Cards, tomorrow, end of third shift?”

“Uh, sure,” Hebsley shrugged, then threw a little smile at Taro. “Sounds like fun.” She paused, wrinkled her nose. “I mean, assuming Sergeant Erso doesn’t just destroy us all in the obstacle course. I heard she’s really, really hardcore.”

“A total hard-ass,” Taro agreed. “I met a guy from the last class she ran through the course. Said he could barely walk.”

“We can watch a holovid, if we’re too tired to play cards,” Matías said, and strode away towards the tray return slot. “See you after shift,” he called over his shoulder to a startled Taro and a speculative Nico.

“See you, brother,” Nico called back, and Matías didn’t dare turn to look at the expression on his face. He was taking enough risks as it was.

Maybe he really was worrying too much. Maybe Nico wouldn’t really fall in love with Rue, maybe he would and it would work out okay. Maybe Taro wouldn’t get in trouble for flirting with an enlisted person, maybe he would and Nico would have to get him out of it. Maybe all these ties and friendships would end up not being worth the effort.

Matías thought of the emptiness in the captain’s eyes, and the smile that had temporarily banished it.

There were, he decided, worse things than a little heartbreak.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Mierdia kor_ is a made up swear word that looks vaguely like space!Spanish, because my headcanon is that Vuchelle was one of the planets were Alderaanian spread a long time ago, and then over time developed it's own dialect.


End file.
